When the Loneliness gets to you

I’m used to being alone. Even when I have others physically near me, I am usually alone. I can’t remember the last time I was able to let someone into all facets of my life and with each passing day, month and year I become less and less hopeful that will ever happen. I’ve become really good at keeping people at arm’s length. It’s one disappointment after another and that’s when I am reminded of how lonely I really am.

Life is hard. Some days are harder than others and I keep trying to leave people better than I found them. It’s not always possible, but I am trying.

I sit here crying, alone and this is where I turn. Because I am expecting a virtual hug at best when I am finished.

I tell myself it’s okay if someone else hurts my feelings, I will always reach out or attempt to make the extra effort. I don’t ever want to regret how I left a relationship. I would rather make sure I did what I could.

As I keep trying to date, I know I push people away. I am afraid they will leave, they will hurt me and I just don’t have it. I couldn’t take that kind of emotional blow in my life.

I have gotten better at not allowing myself to be taken advantage of though and set better standards for how I allow people to treat me. There comes a place in the middle where with some men I can’t tell if I am pushing them away too quickly or I am practicing better standards for how I am treated. At times I know it lies somewhere on the middle. I have little hope to find someone to walk this journey with me.

I am puffy faced with a pile of tissues beside me. I cannot breathe out of my nose. My cheeks and eyes are swollen and it almost looks like I’ve been slapped around. An emotional beat down.

Amazing Grace just came on my playlist. The tears started again. I know self forgiveness is the toughest of all. Because even as I type this words pop into my head all the time like penance, paying my dues, lifelong sentence, this is what I deserve.Now I can tell anyone else besides myself that is not true and have compassion for them. But I don’t feel that for myself. I have given myself a life sentence of guilt and grief that comes in waves. On nights like this, it feels overwhelming, as though the weight of a thousand grieving mothers sits upon my heart.

You are good, you do deserve love, you do deserve people in your life who love and care for the whole you. All of you; your past, present and future. I am going to say this to myself and I encourage any of you who need to say this to yourself to say it as well. Because it is true and I promise it will feel like it eventually, even if it doesn’t in this precise moment. In this dark silence of the night.

These Muddy Waters

I was having a conversation a few nights ago with someone who had a friend who committed suicide last year. He asked me “What triggers it? What were the actual thoughts?” I had previously stated that the feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, helplessness and an unending pain went on for so long that it felt unbearable. It seemed unending. I was speaking from my own experience. My own feelings.

What I wasn’t able to answer, was what specifically that person’s own circumstances were. People have their own unique set of situations that lead us into the abyss and down into the darkness we can’t seem to find our way out of. At different times I have felt suicidal, there have been slightly different sets of trials and tribulations. For me, most of them revolve around personal relationships and abandonment issues. Again

that arises in different ways as well.

Through the years I have learned to identify it and recognize the ways in which I start to become affected. I have spoken of this before.

I have suffered from depression with suicidal ideation since I was 11 years old. Maybe younger, but that’s as far back as I can remember having thoughts of taking my own life.

So there are times in my life that I actively get up and say to myself, I am going to live today. That may not make sense to many of you. But, there are some of you that will make perfect sense to.Even before I became ill with Postpartum Psychosis, I had a family history of suicide and depression.

I would like to believe I am a good example of what not to do after your mother commits suicide and a year later her father kills himself. Please get the family into therapy. Don’t think everything will just be okay. It will rear it’s head eventually. You will have dysfunction a day, or a decade later.

Drafted January 18th, 2016

This is my life. All I can do is keep breathing and there are days when that is all I do. Suicide became my friend early in life. It muddied the waters for me, especially after my mother hung herself. That was my first up close and personal experience with it. Since that time I have lost both family and friends to suicide. I have my own scars, internal and external.

I sat with someone today for lunch who had expressed needing a friend to talk to. I knew he had gone through a divorce and had a rough time of it and was still a little angry over the breaking down of his family. I have a tough time not reaching out when others appear vulnerable, because I understand what that is like.I wish we as a community did more to build each other up, even if all it is was meeting someone for lunch. People don’t want to be forgotten. They want to know they are important. Remembered. No one should ever feel so empty, so alone, so forgotten, hopeless that things will never change for them, that they want to die.

Please reach out for help if you or someone in your family is thinking about suicide. If you know someone who has committed suicide and want to talk call the lifeline http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

I wish I could have answered those questions for him. But there’s always muddy water when someone takes their own life. There was never one specific thing that triggered it for me. There may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. But it was usually a culmination of things over a period of time. Some questions that will forever remain unanswered. It’s something you have to make peace with.Suicide is a tricky bitch. I may be smiling but in the back of my mind I am having those thoughts. They whisper to you, they comfort you. They were just hiding their pain.

Every person has a breaking point. My heart is aching right now as I think about the people I have lost and that I wish I could go back because I know better now. There are some it was so obvious but I was just too young, too inexperienced, too naive. I couldn’t have saved them all, but I could have made a difference to some. Maybe unmuddy the waters a bit. Because life’s complicated enough.